Thursday, July 21, 2016

Fully automate DAOS - set and forget, save diskspace, time and money

If you have a DAOS enabled server with mail files or other databases like Document Libraries containing attachments on your servers that may have slipped through the administration cracks and not been enabled for DAOS participation, even though they should have been, (possibly as an administrative oversight?), this functionality in DDO will automatically DAOS enable those databases and get those attachments into DAOS, it will also automatically pick up any new databases created in the future without the administrator having to think about it, or chase it up.

An example of this DDO processing at work.
In this example (see below) we'll target a couple of databases that make decent candidates for DAOS participation, like most Document Libraries these are full of attachments, so these types of databases make great "low hanging fruit" for DAOS.

We can see below these database are currently not enabled for DAOS participation. Note the DAOS State and DAOS Count indicating this.

Tick the box to “DAOS enable all databases using the following templates” and enter the template name, you can enter multiple template names, mail templates, etc. If there are databases based on this template type that you don’t want DAOS’d enter the name(s) in the “Never DAOSify the following databases” field.

When the automatic maintenance schedule runs, DDO will enable DAOS participation in the targeted databases and the attachments will be moved out of the databases and into the DAOS store as part of the automated DDO maintenance.

Below, we see the results after the schedule ran, the same databases are now enabled for DAOS participation, the attachments have been moved out and as a result the space savings are significant.

Below, we can also see the DAOS State has changed to "Read/Write" and the DAOS count increased.

LZ1 Compression and Data Compression have also been enabled for the databases.

The databases have also been automatically compacted and defragged as part of the DDO workflow.

If you enable the “Automatically monitor DAOS synchronization” box DDO will automatically monitor the synchronization state of the DAOS catalog and as needed a DAOS resync operation can be automatically performed to re-count all the references to NLO files. If required DDO, will initiate a resyc of the DAOS catalog at 12:15AM. If a resync is not required the operation detects that there is no work to do, and will exit immediately.

Note: IBM best practice recommends that if the catalog state changes, a DAOS resync should be performed but, unless Daoscat.nsf has been damaged somehow, there is no immediate need to do a resync. All DAOS functions will continue to operate normally except for the 2AM prune operations, which will be postponed until the DAOS catalog state is SYNCHRONIZED again.